To Increase Forecast Win Rates, Focus on Customer Relationships

Forecasting sales is hard. Sales leaders spend countless hours discussing the criteria by which opportunities should be evaluated before they’re allowed to hit the forecast. Sales managers spend even more hours reviewing forecasts with salespeople to ensure the deals that get added meet those criteria.
Unfortunately, sales organizations don’t seem to be getting any better at this vital task. In our 2018-2019 Sales Performance Study, win rates of forecasted opportunities remained consistent with 2017 levels at 47.3%. No-decisions decreased a bit, from 21.8% to 20.7%, but only because those opportunities fell into the loss column, which increased from 30.9% to 32.0%.
Why do sales forecasts continue to be wrong more than half the time? (click to tweet)
To answer this question, we first have to understand that when we say the average win rate was 47.3%, that doesn’t mean that every organization in our study closed slightly less than half of their forecasted